Start-Up Goes After Google in E-Mail Infringement Suit

TMCnet Contributing Editor

There seems to be no rest for search giant Google. Reuters (News - Alert) reported that the company was named yesterday in a trade secrets lawsuit. The suit claims that the company’s business software unit copied LimitNone LLC, tiny start-up’s tool for moving customers off of Microsoft (News - Alert) software onto Google’s.

LimitNone filed its complaint in an Illinois circuit court alleging that Google had initially promoted the migrating tool from LimitNone to move Microsoft Outlook customers to Gmail. The giant then allegedly coped the idea and went into competition with it.

The commercial litigation firm of Kelley Drye & Warren LLP brought the lawsuit. This is the same team who previously challenged Google (News - Alert) in a trademark case that involved the Silicon Valley company's highly successful online advertising system.

With this lawsuit, LimitNone is seeking reimbursement from Google of actual damages, attorney’s fees and asks the court to award punitive damages. To support its claim, LimitNone’s case details the company’s meetings starting in March 2007 with Google to build a tool it named, “gMove.” This tool was used to move the e-mail, address books and calendars of corporate customers from Microsoft’s Outlook to Gmail.

The case hangs on the fact that LimitNone claims it entered into a confidentiality deal with Google to share trade secrets of its e-mail migration tool with the search giant’s engineers, sales people and key Google Apps customers.

David Rammelt, lead plaintiff’s attorney said that LimitNone had been told by Google that 50 million subscribers was "just too big to come from someone else." A simple calculation of the lost revenue for LimitNone "very quickly gets you up to about $950 million."

The meat of the case is the fact that Google introduced a free, competing e-mail migration tool earlier this year called "Google Email Uploader." The lawsuit alleges that this tool is "almost identical" to gMove and that "both operate under a similar conceptual design."

Following news that Google had decided to compete with it instead of continues its partnership, Palatine, Illinois-based LimitNone shifted its business to focus on the emerging market for business software designed to run on the Apple (News - Alert) iPhone.

Unfortunately for these smaller companies, filing lawsuits against giants like Google can often prove to be too expensive and even time consuming to pursue until ruling. LimitNone is seeking court costs and attorneys’ fees, but they can only collect if they are able to prove their case and win.

Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMCnet and has also written for eastbiz.com. To read more of Susan’s articles, please visit her columnist page.

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